On Sat, 2009-06-13 at 15:28 +0200, Andreas Rottmann wrote: > > A build tool that pollutes the licence of what its used to build would > > be rather problematic > > > Indeed. But do you always need an exception? I had the impression that > the output of a GPL'd tool could be licensed at will, unless the output > contained parts from the tool itself, as is the case with autoconf, for > example, which has an exception for this reason:
IANAL, but as I understand it you are correct. But how to tell that a given tool *doesn't embed any part of itself in the output? [Thats rhetorical, lets not start a new subthread :)]. So sometimes an exception will be needed, and other times it won't be needed and no impact will be made on the copyright status of the binaries. > [...] You need not follow the terms of the GNU General Public License > when using or distributing such scripts, even though portions of > the text of Autoconf appear in them. [...] > > > - do you have any actual examples? > > > A real-life example from libunistring (which I've filed an ITP for [1]): > The source files that will constitute the resulting library package are > all LGPL-3+'d, but the source tarball also contains a test suite, which > is GPL-3+ (without any exception). Now is the license of the test suite > relevant to the resulting library package, effectivly rendering it > GPL-3+? I don't think so, but looking at a debian/copyright file using > the current DEP-5 format, one cannot really tell that the libunistring > package is actually under the LGPL-3+, hence my suggestion to add > information about which license applies to which binary package. My 2c are that the copyright file should be documenting the copyright status of the binary packages; and thus it should not list anything about GPL-3+ in your case, *unless* you were to start shipping the built tests too. It might be useful to say that 'package foo' is GPL3+ and 'package bar' is LPGL3+. I think this is being discussed elsewhere in the thread already in fact. -Rob
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